It *is* a New Day

The “New Day” headscarf design

This blog entry has come rather late because it’s honestly a chapter I am still sojourning through, and that is learning to embrace a new day. A chapter easily said than done, this is where an old season comes to a close and you sense in your spirit that you’ve been invited to fully crossover from one chapter of life into another.

I remember when my family was financially stable after almost 10 years of struggling (stories for another day). Experiences such as paying rent on the same day as buying groceries with ease brought me feelings I thought were illegal: what was this ease, this worry-free living? The audacity. Some moments I wanted to punish myself for feeling so good, only to remember that they were, and to deal with the tension of clashing emotions that warred against my new being. My spirit was teaching me to be at peace… I had no clue how to apprehend it. I remember the experiences of waking up in the morning without worries and how this literally threw my body off because I was so accustomed to the tension of stress, impending doom, catastrophe. I remember days in an emotional daze because I didn’t know my emotional geography during times of peace and goodness. I had no idea how to function with things going well— and I’m not talking about millionaire status. I’m talking needs being met and things being straight overall. For context, I grew up in a household with a dad who financially and verbally abused my mother; wielding fear and authoritarianism to run his home: it wasn’t until my parents’ divorce that my body could experience NOT being tense while being at home.

“Before the day comes dawn, and that’s where I needed to sit with these emotions and address ‘what happened’.”

A few years ago during my hiatus from VGB, it was a particularly beautiful day. There was food in the cabinets and fridge, my bills were paid, and no one in the family was in dire need. The garden was flourishing with magnificent sunflowers, wafting with the scent of bee balm and marigold, and I was about to partake in my hobby, papermaking (which I started in 2020). But yet…some feeling was surging beneath my skin and bubbling in my belly. What was it? I remember hearing plainly in my mind: Chimene, you’re happy. In over 10 years I had never truly felt that feeling without the impending presence of some emergency. In that moment I felt it in its true form, and yes, it sort of freaked me out. I highly doubt I’m the only one to testify to this, but I want to add my testament to the record for future Black women.

In all, in my new season, my new day I felt more “damaged” and unfamiliar to myself than not. I wanted to step into my new day with trailblazing glee, but I felt there was a “meeting” I needed to have with myself first. Before the day comes dawn, and that’s where I needed to sit with these emotions and address “what happened” from a place of peace and safety, and honestly, to say goodbye to the “Chimene” that existed to get me through chapter after chapter of extremely difficult times and ill-willed individuals. She, with her fluency in emergency and intense stress; callous from encountering abusers and users, and comfort in creativity mortared between labor and lack… could not cross over into my new day. That woman had to be shed at the dawn, because though she was strong, she was nolonger needed. Tired and weary, she had to be put to rest before the sun came up in my new day. That funeral, that eulogy to the woman I was and no longer had to be is what I needed to document.

I mused on the lines that came to me while living in a hotel with my family just before life got better:

It is a new day,
and whether the sun rises gently in the sky
or rips harshly over the horizon
it IS a new day.

In retrospect, I understand that these words were meant to prepare me for how suddenly life would change, and the portent to eulogize the previous day so that I could sojourn in a new chapter without loose ends. Whether life gradually shifts or is instantly transitioned from bad to good, it’s a new day. You can’t start life at the horizon, you gotta STEP IN. Let me tell you something: there are some long, difficult seasons that end with an audacious swiftness as if they never were. And it can offend you to suddenly be in a good or a different place (like when your last child goes to college and you’re suddenly an empty-nester), to arrive in your “FINALLY” in a timeline of “SUDDENLY” and to be disoriented with the change of scenery. You may not know how attached you are to hardship until you have provision; to difficulty until you’re furnished with ease; busyness until you can be still, without task; to darkness until a season comes and there is lightness. And that severing, that detachment can be a conundrum because here you are existing in an answered prayer but feeling some sadness, confusion, disorientation, exhaustion, and even a bit of stir-craziness at the reality of being able to be still and recover in every way.

Recouperation and rehabilitation, sabbath and reorientation as life seasons can feel like an enemy before they feel like a friend, interrupting the flow you were in, the routine you had secured for yourself while living in chaos, poverty, abuse, being overworked, etc. Relaxing can feel like you’re wasting time or even worse, physically painful because your body has only known tenseness and emergency fight-or-flight for so long. Your spirit, already weary, now feels wary at accepting the invitation to cease from sorrow; to come and dine. I can’t help but wonder what our enslaved ancestors felt when slavery “ended” (If you know, you know): all they’d known was torture and violation, exploitation and violence then now they were told they were free. If my sudden end of hardship threw of my body, I wonder how my ancestors felt, whirling with the reality that their bodies and minds could be used differently because they were “free”… I’ve read in enslaved narratives how grand of an adjustment it was: Black women could be pregnant by someone they loved, of their free will and KEEP the child to have a FAMILY. Black men could wake up when they wanted and start the day as they pleased. I’m not trivializing emancipation (because the terror of the Reconstruction Era followed), but I have a heart for our ancestors navigating the clash of sensations and ideas of possibilities during that brief window period at the end of the plantation era. I wonder if some died of relief?

“And that is the command you must obey: heal and become better.”

And what of you? How have you been in your crossover? Are you good being good? Can you dialogue with hope or is it still too early? That’s alright. Have you basked in the sun over your new day or are you still in the dawn where you need to lay your past, weary self to rest and then grieve a bit? Don’t grieve too long, love: the sun’s coming up. It IS a new day.

And what else are you burying? Survival and coping mechanisms that numbed the pain through the hard times. You’re now invited to release these through the act of healing. You don’t have to hold that any longer. You don’t need to dissociate when the memories of who or what hurt you flood your mind and weigh on your psyche as heaviness. You don’t have to take shelter in a bottle or a painkiller to ease the pain of an abject situation. You don’t have to watch the TV until the pangs of hurt become distance from your heart. No, here you are invited to take stock of the shocks and wounds in the safety of peace, ease, and recouperation. You can sleep and dream; awake refreshed and face the troubles that you had no capacity to face in your last season. That’s why you are HERE. Don’t resent Here for it’s surgical graciousness in beckoning you to review the accounts of pain and sorrow; abuse and rejection; being despised and soulfully maimed by others’ words and deeds. Here, things around you are good so that things within you can grow to be better. And that is the command you must obey: heal and become better.

…Wilt thou be made whole?

That is my motive to the “New Day” collection and all its encouragement. For all you who are new to being in a good place, I encourage you to sit with yourself and take stock of what you once had to be, nolonger need to be, and are being invited to become.

Sojourner, I want to encourage you to be willing to “forget” the muscle memory of what it meant for you to function in the dysfunctional; in the season where you were surviving, coping, striving through heinous situations and environments, and enduring the things that made you durable but were ultimately unnatural. You’re not forgetting what happened, you’re shedding irrelevant tendencies and ways of thinking and patterns of existence that don’t fit this new place where you now are in the journey. You’ve learned to live in the trenches—whether poverty, abuse, a stressful job, etc.— and now learn to live where you have abundance: of resources, time, mental capacity... Some of us need to relearn how to have “nothing” on our mind! There are seasons of life that do drain us with their demands on our spirit and mind and then there are seasons that invite us to reconnect with our humanity in a time of healing without labor or toil as background functions. And yes, these seasons can be ARDUOUS to endure, because you must learn to be good with goodness, at peace with peace, joyful with joy… etc. You have to learn to eat to be full and not to be fueled. To sleep because it’s night and not because you’ve crashed. And yes: you even must learn to journal because you must to chronicle and not because your spirit is weighed with horrors. I want you to enjoy this new day where you can mature you without trauma shaping your determination, and can learn to walk without boulders of trials beneath your feet.

To reiterate, you will notice that part of exiting trauma and entering a healthy season of ease can usher you to a place of mourning, of grief. That’s OK because your soul NEEDS that: Don’t rush it or neglect yourself because you are scared to stop fretting, afraid to unlearn chronic stress and anxiety. Cast your cares— you can do that now. You’ve been the survivor for SO LONG that now functioning with less alertness feels like you are allowing part of yourself to decay… You ARE. It feels like learning to walk again. YOU ARE. It feels like recovering from a wound… You ARE. It can also feel like betrayal: no, love. You’re actually showing loyalty to your whole humanity by loving your up as much as your down; your inhale as much as your exhale.

So much of entering a new day is grieving the day before— especially if that “day” was a decade of hardship, a long career at a company, a (n) [abusive] marriage or long-term relationship, etc. And this isn’t to say that you are not willing to move forward, it’s honoring the human response to working at one rhythm for a long time and then suddenly the music changes and your body has to learn to dance a different sort of motion. “Get over it” isn’t the response, but facilitating the transition with acknowledgement that you are not “there” anymore, and “here” you can move onward— but there is beauty in acknowledging what happened.

And as you are grieving, processing and reconciling, you are learning to be OK with things being OK.
Please, embrace this new day, sis. Don’t punish yourself by clinging to the idea of pain or the memory of things not being so good. This season is functioning to complete you in the safety of ease and the healing of recouperation. LET IT HAPPEN. Unclench your jaw, bring your voice to an octave of peace, speak to your mind so it can loosen its grip on worry, and tell your soul: it IS a NEW DAY.